Tom threw Wyatt a swift glance. She was tense.
“Nothing,” Tom said brusquely. He stooped and shoved the floor panel back on.
“This obviously isn’t nothing,” Vik said, pointing at the floor.
“What are you doing here?” Tom threw back at him.
“I’m meeting Lyla. Her roommate hates me, and we wanted to go somewhere Giuseppe wouldn’t sit and watch us creepily,” Vik said. “Now your turn.”
Tom shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
“I asked, so yeah, I want to know.”
“Why even bother?” Wyatt flared up. “You were mad when you knew about that other thing. Maybe you don’t want to know about this.”
Vik blinked, his thick eyebrows raised. “You’re talking again.”
“Yeah, she’s talking,” Tom said.
“I’m glad, that’s all,” Vik said. “Can’t I say I’m glad about that?”
“No,” Tom said, and suddenly, he was furious with Vik. He hadn’t even realized it until now, when anger, hot and vicious, ignited inside him. “You don’t get to say that to Wyatt, and you don’t get to ask what we’re up to. You dropped us, not the other way around.”
“It’s not like that,” Vik protested.
“Then what’s it like?”
The door slid open, and Lyla Martin strolled in. They lapsed into silence. For her part, Lyla shook her head and turned to Vik. “No way,” she told him. “We are not sharing the room with them.”
Tom nudged Wyatt, sending her a questioning glance. Was she done?
She nodded.
Tom turned to the standoffish Lyla, and the sheepish Vik. “Don’t worry. We’re outta here.”
Vik didn’t call after them.
SINCE NEARLY FREEZING to death, cold had become Tom’s least favorite thing in the world. When Yosef’s group hooked into the sim, and Tom found himself a Napoleonic soldier standing in the middle of the bitter winter in Russia, he cursed inwardly. His joints began to throb at the first nip of the icy wind, and that’s when Wyatt’s program kicked in and began bombarding him with memories from the other Middles.
The image of the Obsidian Corp. visit from Giuseppe’s point of view filled his vision, and Tom tumbled over into the snow, cold wetness seeping up his arms. He staggered upright, half-blind, and grew aware of the crackling of gunfire as they engaged today’s enemy group, even as his mind filled with images from January.
Giuseppe had obviously spent much of the tour daydreaming about some hotel in Paris he liked, because the images of Obsidian Corp. were intercut with those mental images.
A simulated Russian soldier rushed at Tom, and Tom narrowly managed to impale the guy on his bayonet before more of the memory washed over him. Giuseppe was admiring himself, straining to see his own face reflected in one of the large windows. Nearby, Giuseppe could see Blackburn with his large back to the Obsidian Corp. techs, shoulders curled protectively over the forearm keyboard he was tapping. Tom knew that must’ve been when he’d hacked Obsidian Corp.’s intranet and found his blackmail material.
In his own simulation, Tom staggered away from the main body of his group, figuring that he couldn’t focus on both fighting and the memories. He had to stay low, and worst-case scenario, someone would find and kill him. He sank against a wall inside a half-destroyed house, the boom of cannons rumbling like thunder in the distance, more memories rushing into his brain.
His neural processor automatically integrated the varying images of Obsidian Corp., stitching them together in a full mental map, matching up the time stamps. It was strange seeing things as if he’d been in several different places at once, like he’d had more eyes than his own. He could gaze around an entire image from a single time frame and see what many people had seen.
It grew stranger still seeing memory after memory from the time frame after he’d been stuck outside, when he could reference his own memories of the bitter cold. Everyone else had been on an innocuous tour. Some had noticed Blackburn hacking the intranet, some had not.
While Tom had been outside trying to stand up again, all the other trainees had been inside, taking turns petting a Bengal tiger named Kalkin, who was as domesticated as a house cat, complete with a neural processor of his own. . . .
While Tom had been lying on the snow, unconscious, Blackburn had finished his hacking, looked over the group, and said sharply, “Someone’s missing.” And then, “Raines. Where is he? Where is Tom Raines?” He looked at Vik.
Vik squirmed uneasily but did his best to look innocent.
Blackburn jabbed at his forearm keyboard and swore ferociously. “How did that kid get outside?”
And in every memory, Vik’s eyes grew very wide, terrible comprehension on his face.
It was Vik’s own memory that made something inside Tom go still. He noticed through Vik’s eyes that he’d left—right after Tom really had been cut off from the group. Vik said nothing, covering for him.
Then he felt Vik’s shock when he realized Tom had been outside this whole time. He saw Vik risk Blackburn’s wrath by staying after the other trainees were ordered home. He saw through Vik’s eyes when he was hauled in, felt Vik’s stomach plunge as he’d wondered if Tom was dead. He saw Vik’s mind calling up the memory of Tom’s near climb up the transmission pole, and his ears stung with the memory of Blackburn’s words, “You aren’t doing him any favors. . . .” He felt in his stomach Vik’s nauseating sense of guilt.
So when he’d finished downloading the last memory, Tom roused from his stupor and discovered he wasn’t alone in the simulation of the burned-out house. Vik was there, too, and he felt like he finally understood it all now. He knew why Vik had been so strange.
“Hey,” Tom called.
Vik turned. They were on opposing sides of this sim, but it didn’t seem to matter now. “Are you all right? I knew the minute the sim started you might not like this one. I lit a fire.”
“I’m okay.”
“Right.” He raised his eyebrows. “That’s why you’re here. In a swoon.”
“I wasn’t swooning. I was deeply in thought about something.”
“Sure you were, Tom.”
Tom staggered over to drop by the crackling flames, the heat washing over his skin, over his numbed hands. “That thing you asked earlier. You still wanna know what Wyatt and I were doing? Are you sure?”
Vik nodded. “Tell me.”
“I’m going to Obsidian Corp. to blow out the transmitter that’s connected to Yuri. No transmitter means Yuri’s not a security hazard anymore, which means there’s a case to give him a new processor. I’m going in person, Vik, so I’m getting every bit of data I can.”
Vik eyed him. “That’s insane.”
“And reckless and stupid, Vik. It’s literally a building full of killing machines in the middle of Antarctica. If you want to delete me telling you this as soon as Applied Scrimmages ends, I won’t blame you. But here it is. The truth. You wanted to know, and I owed it to you to tell you. Now you get the choice.”
For a moment, the only sound in the room with them was the crackling of the flames in the hearth. “This could save Yuri’s life,” Vik said, half in question.